Whether you are covered by FERS or CSRS, you can retire on any day of the week you want. Image: fizkes/Shutterstock.com
By: Reg JonesMid-year is when many federal employees start doing some serious thinking about retiring, often eyeing the period around the end of the year when there always is a surge in retirements. If you are one of them, you need to first be certain that you will have the right combination of age and service to do it.
The rules are simple for CSRS. You can retire on an immediate annuity at age 62 with at least 5 years of service, 60 with 20 years of service or age 55 with 30.
The rules for FERS are more complex. As a FERS employee you can also retire at age 62 with at least 5 years of service and age 60 with 20 years of service. However, unlike CSRS you can only retire with 30 years of service if you have reached your minimum retirement age. MRAs range from 55 to 57 depending on your year of birth. As an additional wrinkle, you can also retire at your MRA with as few as 10 years of service; however, if you do that, your annuity will be reduced by 5 percent (5/12ths of 1 percent per month) that you are under age 62.
The good news is that whether you are covered by FERS or CSRS, you can retire on any day of the week you want to, even on a holiday, or at any point during a pay period. However, if you retire at any time other than the end of a pay period, you won’t get credit for any sick or annual leave you would have otherwise earned during those two weeks.
Also, the rules about when a retirement annuity starts are different for FERS and CSRS employees. If you are a FERS employee, you’d have to retire no later than the last day of a month to be on the annuity roll in the following month. For example, you’d need to leave by November 30 to be on the annuity roll in December. If you missed that last day of November cutoff by even one day, you wouldn’t be on the annuity roll until January.
The rules are different for CSRS. You can retire up to the third day of the month and still receive an annuity for that month; however, each day you wait before retiring reduces the amount of your annuity for that month by one day. For example, if you separated on December 3, the amount of annuity you earned in December would be based on 27 days. Since December has 31 days, why won’t it be based on 28 days? The reason is simple.
For annuity purposes, OPM divides the year into 12 30-day months. That way your monthly annuity payments won’t rise or fall based on the length of a given month.
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